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The other day I received an e-mail from an organization that caters to seniors (of which I’m a member) and that has a 4 letter acronym as a title. This organization was offering a series of free classes in how … Continue reading →

There has been one issue that has occupied my mind for quite some time. Recently, I listened to a report that put my brain on high alert based on the fear that humans have run out of time. Here’s my … Continue reading →

According to Ancestry dot com, my DNA is a mishmash of curious combinations. While the main classifications that they identified held no great surprises, after seeing my DNA pie chart, I’m left with unexplainable images of a debonair Italian troubadour … Continue reading →

It has been a while since I’ve written about foster care, but I felt that I needed to share this. If you know anything about foster care, then you know that one of the main objectives is reunification of the … Continue reading →

As a reader, I have a general book length that I prefer reading. As a writer, I found I did, too. When I wrote my first book, it just naturally came out to about 75,000 words which equals roughly between … Continue reading →

Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: “After 60 years the stern sentence of the burial service seems to have a meaning that one did not notice in former years. There begins to be something personal about it.” While John Oxenham wrote: “For death begins with life’s first breath; and life begins at touch of death.”

A Retrospect in Death is a story about discovery. You think you know yourself? Perhaps you only think you do. Do those closest to us know us better than we know ourselves; or do they, as we often insist, know jack? Consider that only in death can you really know, and understand, who and why you are—or were. And then ask yourself: At that point, is it too late? Does it even matter?

Darker than any of J. Conrad Guest’s previous novels, while also more humorous, it portends not only a search for the meaning of life, but also seeks to determine why we are as we are: prewired at conception, or the product of our environment?

J. Conrad Guest: What inspired me was a desire to write something that was more honest than anything I’d written before, along with a fascination with death. Although I’ve not yet reached 60 years, I relate to Oliver Wendell Holmes’s adage: “After 60 years the stern sentence of the burial service seems to have a meaning that one did not notice in former years. There begins to be something personal about it.” Our society fears death, when it is the most natural thing in life. And while the health care industry frets over which disease is the leading cause of death, I’ve always felt it was birth. Or as John Oxenham wrote: “For death begins with life’s first breath; and life begins at touch of death.”